local posts

We are thrilled to announce today that Patch has signed two-time All-Star and four-time Golden Glove winner Mark Teixeira as "Commissioner of Patch Baseball"! Patch is all about hometown and neighborhood, and what's more hometown than baseball? Mark will answer questions from residents of Patch towns, share baseball tips, post exclusive videos, and offer young athletes some advice about healthful eating and staying in shape. Mark is a resident of a Patch town, grew up in another, and is an avid Patch user and supporter. We're very excited to have him on the team!

If you can dream it, you can pin it. Heck, even if you can't dream it, someone else dreamt it and you can just 're-pin' it. Unless you have been living on a remote island in the south pacific for past six months, you've probably heard about the tremendously popular social platform that enables people to create pin boards of things they love or are inspired by, called Pinterest. Travel, be it a place you've visited or a place you like to go to, is a big part of what people share on Pinterest. We thought we'd make travel 'pinning' even better by giving people the option to create maps that work with Pinterest so each trip has context to followers.

Here are some cool examples of how people on Pinterest use MapQuest to make their travel related pins even cooler.

How does it work? It's super easy, if you just want a map of a location, simply create your map on MapQuest and then click the "Pin It" Button at the top right of the MapQuest page. This will create a map image and link that you can then upload to Pinterest and add to your 'pin board'.
Careful...it's addictive!

We've proud to announce that we've added a new Patcher to the team! Rachel Fishman Feddersen will serve as our first Chief Content Officer, overseeing Patch's consumer strategy, as well as scaled content and product initiatives to help deliver unmatched user experience across every Patch town. Working closely with all of our teams, Rachel will help drive innovation in product and programming for our Patch neighbors.

Rachel joins us from The Parenting Group, where she most recently served as Editorial Director, Digital Content, Strategy and Design, overseeing all digital development of the Parenting, Babytalk and Conceive brands and their online extensions. Rachel's addition to the Patch leadership team follows significant traffic and engagement growth, including our recent ascension to being a top-5 property in comScore's regional/local category. Patch currently has 863 sites in 22 states plus Washington, D.C., with over one thousand professional journalists managing those sites and over 14,000 bloggers contributing content.

To learn more about Rachel, check out her blog post on The Patch Blog.

We are thrilled to announce that Patch has become the #4 local and regional property, according to comScore's December rankings, up from #10 at the beginning of 2011. This UV growth continued in December despite a seasonal decrease among many other local and regional sites. Patch launched less than 3 years ago, and the average age of Patch sites is less than 14 months old - so you can imagine how proud we are of this accomplishment. It is truly a testament to the hard work of our teams in communities across America. Most importantly it shows that Patch continues to engage and connect with residents of towns, which, after all, is where our focus is day and night. Go Patch!

Last week, MapQuest Vibe closed out the last of a series of TechCocktail sponsorships in Boulder, Washington DC, San Francisco and finally Phoenix.

TechCocktail highlights emerging technology news, people, startups, products, and innovations for the true tech enthusiast. The sponsorships allowed for 40 start-ups to participate in the events for free and show off their products in front of almost 1800 attendees.